Weaver D.R. Weinbaum > Quotes

“Living life as an experiment is not merely a lifestyle choice. It is a metaphysical commitment to the primacy of difference over identity and of becoming over being. One’s life gains meaning in as far as it facilitates the possibility of evolution, of growth and the overcoming of limits. Life lived as an experiment becomes an expression of open-ended intelligence. Style and aesthetics do mightily matter but these are not prescribed; they need to be figured out in the course of one’s becoming. Life as an experiment is a thought experiment and an experiment in thinking. It is to think and let oneself be thought while not taking anything for granted; to be able to escape the banality of everything habitual in sense and thought. A real thought is real to the extent that it transforms the thinker.”
― Weaver D.R. Weinbaum, Open-Ended Intelligence

“Social systems can move mountains and eventually perhaps planets and stars. Still, no walking through walls.... And if they come to allow walking through walls eventually, just as a point, it will require a serious tweaking of constraints and degrees of freedom at the relevant substrate level (i.e., atoms, molecules, etc.) just as the very reality of your mobile phone requires.”
― Weaver D.R. Weinbaum, Social Systems: Where is the Ground?

“There is no underlying principle or reproducible pattern associated with extraordinary intelligence exactly because it operates prior to principles and patterns. The only way to understand it is in historical perspective, when the naked New has already been enrobed/incorporated into a system of distinctions, labels, concepts and relations; when it has already become organised into a containing narrative. It is then, in retrospect, that we can reflect and see it for what it is or is not. Even so, this is not anymore the instance per se that we are talking about but its representation in relation to an already constructed narrative and where both representation and narrative emerge as secondary products after the fact. So paradoxically, instances of extraordinary intelligence are irretrievable as such; we can only follow the traces and after-effects they have left in our minds, much the same as we learn about elementary particles in physics only by following the traces they have left in a bubble chamber.”
― Weaver D.R. Weinbaum, The Practice of Thinking: Cultivating the Extraordinary

“The fact that most of the mass of the atom is concentrated in its center is just a fact of distribution but does not make atoms more or less 'empty space'. This is really a very not serious description taken from the propaganda of popular science. See for yourself, climb on your scales and say 'I am mostly empty space' and see if your scale is impressed and will show you a more favorable number... The solidity of matter at the molecular level is not due to them being 'full' or 'empty' space but due to interactions between atoms mediated (mostly) by electromagnetic forces. Also this is a gross simplification, but seriously solidity is achieved through interaction of physical forces and not boundaries of concepts.”
― Weaver D.R. Weinbaum, Social Systems: Where is the Ground?

“It is not that the spider stands on a solid ground 'composed of' whatever... it is the spider itself which is composed of that whatever. The distinction and separation between spider and ground is a philosophical confusion. No matter how many levels of spiders you would come up with, they are immanent one within the other. This is the heresy of Spinoza about God. He denied this very separation, equating God with the organization of 'lesser forms and substances'.”
― Weaver D.R. Weinbaum, Social Systems: Where is the Ground?

“Making survival a fetish would never allow something positive and life affirming to be seen in change. This perspective is deeply rooted in culture, in language, in perception, in the conceptual systems that facilitate thought and reasoning, and of course in social constructs and the psychological makeup of human individuals. In a nutshell it is a fundamental metaphysical position that prefers the world to be described in terms of being rather than becoming, in terms of final products rather than processes and in terms of identity rather than difference, that prevents one from seeing life not only as the autopoeitic self-preserving process that it is but also as the self-overcoming open-ended process that it is. The very notion of thinking about life (or evolution for that matter) as having a definite purpose or goal is already a symptom of a deeply rooted bias in favour of the constant and against change. There are voices that will immediately attack this view, blaming it for insinuating that life has no purpose at all. But a dialectic of such kind is empty of any credence if not entirely absurd. The view I propose here does not indeed accept that life is subjugated to a single purpose or principle but instead affirms life as having not one purpose but infinitely multiple ones, not one goal but multiple goals and, moreover, the vast majority of these purposes and goals cannot be known a priori because they are subject to continuous formative processes of becoming. This is why life as such is open-ended.”
― Weaver D.R. Weinbaum, Open-Ended Intelligence